Mr. Williams quotes Poe’s distinction between “nationality in letters” and the local in literature. Nationality in letters is deplorable, whereas the local is essential. All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with a spirit of place.
The local, of course, in Mr. Williams’s sense, is the very opposite of the parochial, the parish-pump stuff. The local in America is America itself. Not Salem, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or New York, but that of the American subsoil which spouts up in any of those places into the lives of men.
In these studies of “American” heroes, from Red Eric of Greenland, and Columbus and Cortes and Montezuma, on to Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Williams tries to reveal the experience of great men in the Americas since the advent of the whites. History in this book would be a sensuous record of the Americanization of the white men in America, as contrasted with ordinary history, which is a complacent record of the civilization and Europizing (if you can allow the word) of the American continent.
In this record of truly American heroes, then, the author is seeking out not the ideal achievement of great men of the New World but the men themselves, in all the dynamic explosiveness of their energy. This peculiar dynamic energy, this strange yearning and passion and uncanny explosive quality in men derived from Europe, is American, the American element. Seek out this American element, O Americans! is the poet’s charge.
All America is now going hundred per cent American. But the only hundred per cent American is the Red Indian, and he can only be canonized when he is finally dead. And not even the most American American can transmogrify into an Indian. Whence, then, the hundred per cent?
It is here that Mr. Williams’s — and Poe’s — distinction between the national and the local is useful. Most of the hundred per centism is national, and therefore not American at all. The new one hundred per cent literature is all about Americans, in the intensest American vernacular. And yet, in vision, in conception, in the very manner, it still remains ninety-nine per cent European. But for Ulysses and Marcel Proust and a few other beetling high-brows, where would the modernist hundred per centers of America have been? Alas, where they are now, save for cutting a few capers.
What then? William Carlos Williams tries to bring into his consciousness America itself, the still-unravished bride of silences. The great continent, its bitterness, its brackish quality, its vast glamour, its strange cruelty. Find this, Americans, and get it into your bones. The powerful, unyielding breath of the Americas, which Columbus sniffed, even in Europe, and which sent the Conquistadores mad. National America is a gruesome sort of fantasy. But the unravished local America still waits vast and virgin as ever, though in process of being murdered.
The author sees the genius of the continent as a woman with exquisite, super-subtle tenderness and recoiling cruelty. It is a myth-woman who will demand of men a sensitive awareness, a supreme sensuous delicacy, and at the same time an infinitely tempered resistance, a power of endurance and of resistance.
To evoke a vision of the essential America is to evoke Americans, bring them into conscious life. To bring a few American citizens into American consciousness — the consciousness at present being all bastardized European — is to form the nucleus of the new race. To have the nucleus of a new race is to have a future: and a true aristocracy. It is to have the germ of an aristocracy in sensitive tenderness and diamond-like resistance.
A man, in America, can only begin to be American. After five hundred years there are no racial white Americans. They are only national, woebegone, or strident. After five hundred years more there may be the developing nucleus of a true American race. If only men, some few, trust the American passion that is in them, and pledge themselves to it.
But the passion is not national. No man who doesn’t feel the last anguish of tragedy — and beyond, that — will ever know America, or begin, even at the beginning’s beginning, to be American.
There are two ways of being American: and the chief, says Mr. Williams, is by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the Puritan way. The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way.
And this, this sensitive touch upon the unseen America, is to be the really great adventure in the New World. Mr. Williams’s book contains his adventure; and, therefore, for me, has a fascination. There are very new and profound glimpses into life: the strength of insulated smallness in the New Englanders, the fascination of “being nothing” in the Negroes, the spell-bound quality of men like Columbus, De Soto, Boone. It is a glimpse of what the vast America wants men to be, instead of another strident assertion of what men have made, do make, will make, can make, out of the murdered territories of the New World.
It would be easy enough to rise, in critical superiority, as a critic always feels he must, superior to his author, and find fault. The modernist style is sometimes irritating. Was Tenochtitlan really so wonderful? (See Adolf Bandelier’s The Golden Man.) Does not Mr. Williams mistake Poe’s agony of destructive penetration, through all the horrible bastard-Europe alluvium of his 1840 America, for the positive America itself?
But if an author rouses my deeper sympathy he can have as many faults as he likes, I don’t care. And if I disagree with him a bit, heaven save me from feeling superior just because I have a chance to snarl. I am only too thankful that Mr. Williams wrote his book.